I do a lot of both reading and writing. When I finally stepped into whatever century this is and bought an ebook reader (Kindle-because Amazon has mass quantities of free classics; I now have quite a library of classics. But I digress), I started reading even more. Is there a title beyond "avid reader"? And because I'm a penny-pincher sometimes, I looked for ways to get free books. I found those previously mentioned classics. I discovered Library2Go (I can only borrow those ebooks but that's not a problem). I discovered Book Bub and Pixel of Ink which send me daily emails about free or seriously low-priced ebooks. And even Smashwords (where I, too, now have a book).
You would be right if you guessed that many of the freebies are from new, self-published authors. (I also got a couple of Artemis Fowl books for free, the Hunger Game trilogy for small change, and several others that were reduced in price. So there. Anyway...) I happen to like the "new" authors. Being "self-published" doesn't mean that their writing is bad just because a "real" publisher didn't snatch them up. I have found some great books! (Remember? I'm a beyond-avid-reader).  Have I found some awful ones as well? YES! I just delete those.
Where does the Writing part of this post come in? Right now. The stories that I delete renew my desire to write well for whoever reads my books! I want the formatting and spelling to be perfect. (I'll probably miss something but hopefully not a lot - I pre-apologize.) I want my stories to be great! And just so you know, I'm working on it. It's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it.

It takes so long to cut a Shakespeare script. And, yes, when I'm directing a Shakespeare play with teens in it and the audience is going to be their parents and younger siblings, I'm cutting Shakespeare...okay, that's my excuse but really I cut Shakespeare because I can't stand the play to keep going on and on and on. So back to cutting.

At first I was cutting some words here and a small section there. I added my changes to my document on the computer and saw that I still had 10 PAGES worth of script to cut! Alas! Alack! This was a tragedy!

Second time through, I was kind of on a rampage. I couldn't take forever to cut the thing. Funny part here? Cut; there were already funny parts in the script. Poetical & flowery language about love? Forget it; gotta get to the root, the essence of the thing. Finally I got done and it worked out okay.

And thus I see why some of my own novels remain un-edited: I either don't want to cut down to the essence...or that's all I have left. *sigh* Back to work.